Obesity remains a serious health problem and it is no secret that many people want to lose weight. Behavioral economists typically argue that “nudges” help individuals with various decisionmaking flaws to live longer, healthier, and better lives. In an article in the new issue of Regulation, Michael L. Marlow discusses how nudging by government differs from nudging by markets, and explains why market nudging is the more promising avenue for helping citizens to lose weight.

Two long wars, chronic deficits, the financial crisis, the costly drug war, the growth of executive power under Presidents Bush and Obama, and the revelations about NSA abuses, have given rise to a growing libertarian movement in our country – with a greater focus on individual liberty and less government power. David Boaz’s newly released The Libertarian Mind is a comprehensive guide to the history, philosophy, and growth of the libertarian movement, with incisive analyses of today’s most pressing issues and policies.

Search form

Tag: blogs

In his famous “Petition of the Candlemakers,” the great classical liberal thinker Frederic Bastiat lampooned the protectionist arguments of his day by imagining a campaign—launched by the producers of artificial illumination—against “ruinous competition” from that “merciless” scab… the sun. Via In These Times and the Lawyers, Guns & Money blog, I see that someone forgot to explain to the Newspaper Guild and National Writers Union that Bastiat’s petition was, you know, satire.

Borrowing a page from writer Jon Tasini, whose meritless lawsuit against the Huffington Post was roundly and justly ridiculed back in April, those two groups are advocating a boycott of the opinion and news site. They complain that, though HuffPo pays salaries to an enormous number of staff writers, reporters, and editors—apparently more than the New York Times does, if you count the whole AOL newsroom—the site also has the temerity to run lots of unpaid essays and blog posts from volunteer writers, comprising a motley assortment of entertainment celebrities, elected officials, veteran journalists, academics (both famous and obscure), and political activists. As we can see from the millions of individuals clacking away at their keyboards for lesser-known personal or group blogs—or, for that matter, signing up for open-mic nights or posting photos on Flickr—there’s no shortage of people who want the opportunity to share their ideas or their creativity with an audience, but aren’t necessarily looking to make a career of it. Isn’t it great that some companies have found a way to make a profit by providing so many amateur writers, photographers, moviemakers, and artists with a platform?

Not so great, apparently, if you’re among those who feel entitled to be paid for what many happily do gratis—but can’t improve on the amateurs enough to demand a premium for their copy (And all those heartless people in consensual sexual relationships—won’t someone think of the escorts!?). Since their target audience isn’t hugely sympathetic to a “sharing is evil” message (isn’t that what we Rand-besotted Cato folks are supposed to believe?) they’re doing their best to persuade folks that if someone is making a buck, somebody else must be getting exploited:

Ultimately, HuffPo is surviving on the adjunct model. Like higher education with its hordes of PhDs with no job prospects, there is a huge supply of writers who want to make a living in journalism. HuffPo offers the promise of gaining valuable experience and readership so that someday, maybe, you can make it big.

This is a dishonest proposition by HuffPo. It is almost impossible in 2011 to go from a no one to a big name blogger. The blogosphere is ossified. During the explosion of the medium from 2004-06, young writers could produce excellent work and become big name people. Then, by 2007, those were the only blogs people read. Today, those are the prominent and still young writers of the progressive blogosphere. And they aren’t going anywhere.

Now, on a random Thursday evening at The Passenger in DC, I could probably pick out half a dozen successful young progressive writer-bloggers who were unknown in 2007, but let that pass. Skimming the site’s current blog sidebar, I spot such naifs as veteran CBS News correspondent Bob Simon, American Prospect co-founder Bob Kuttner, longtime Harper’s editor Lewis Lapham—all, apparently, hoping for their big break at the Huffington Post! Not to mention UCLA law professor Adam Winkler, movie star Nia Vardalos, or Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu, all dreaming wistfully of an internship offer from the New Republic. And will nobody shed a tear for poor, powerless Sen. Claire McCaskill? Was Jerusalem builded here, among these dark satanic mills?

The reality, of course, is that lots of industries are finding it hard to adapt to an age where the Internet’s ability to harness, aggregate, and distribute so much amateur effort and creativity is creating disruptive abundance where scarcity once promised a steady income. How many of your friends have bought a hardcover dictionary or encyclopedia in the last five years? When did you last need to buy a map on a long car trip? How many of us have decided that, with so many clever people sharing their creative visions on YouTube (and the best of television available for purchase a-la-carte), paying for a cable subscription is a mug’s game? You can love the new reality or hate it, but it seems perverse to blame it on Arianna Huffington, who’s been among the few to find a viable model for turning a profit by fusing amateur contributions and paid professional content.

And for those other publications in the MSM still standing at the edge of the pool: the water’s warm folks, c’mon in.

What’s really interesting, though, is that the HHS had the moral fibre to actually issue a press release about this damning study. That showed courage – and a certain panache. I particularly liked this, from HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius: “Research clearly shows that Head Start positively impacts the school readiness of low-income children.”

Umm, yes Ms. Secretary, but the same research shows those effects vanish by the end of first grade. I guess that information is on a need-to-not-know basis. The public needs to not know about it or the administration hasn’t got a snowball’s chance in Kauai of getting American tax payers to throw another $100 billion or so at government pre-K, as President Obama is so very keen to do.

Update:

In my original review of the coverage on this story I missed the blog that first broke the story: Early Ed Watch at the New America Foundation. One thing that distinguishes New America’s supporters of big government pre-k programs from those in the Obama administration is that the former have a good grasp of the implications of this study, writing that: “The next few weeks are probably going to be rocky ones for the Head Start community. Results released today from the Impact Study show that children’s gains from participating in Head Start, documented in a 2005 installment of the study, do not last through the end of 1st grade.”

But if the folks at the NAF recognize this reality, that begs an important question: will they now redirect their efforts to the support of programs whose benefits for disadvantaged children actually grow in magnitude the longer kids stay in school, or will they continue to push for programs like Head Start that have been proven costly failures?

“Americans are more likely today than in the recent past to believe that government is taking on too much responsibility for solving the nation’s problems and is over-regulating business,” according to a new Gallup Poll.

New Gallup data show that 57% of Americans say the government is trying to do too many things that should be left to businesses and individuals, and 45% say there is too much government regulation of business. Both reflect the highest such readings in more than a decade.

The last time the number of people who believe government is doing too much hit 57 percent was in October 1994, shortly before voters threw Democrats out of power in both the House and Senate. It continued to rise after that, hitting 60 percent in December 1995, before settling down in the later Clinton and Bush years.

Also, the number of people who say there is too much government regulation of business and industry has reached its highest point since Gallup began asking the question in 1993.

That might give an ambitious administration pause. The independents who swung the elections in 2006 and 2008 clearly think things have gone too far. An administration as smart as Bill Clinton’s will take the hint and rein it in. Meanwhile, another recent poll, by the Associated Press and the National Constitution Center, shows that

Americans decidedly oppose the government’s efforts to save struggling companies by taking ownership stakes even if failure of the businesses would cost jobs and harm the economy, a new poll shows.

The Associated Press-National Constitution Center poll of views on the Constitution found little support for the idea that the government had to save AIG, the world’s largest insurer, mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the iconic American company General Motors last year because they were too big to fail.

Just 38 percent of Americans favor government intervention - with 60 percent opposed - to keep a company in business to prevent harm to the economy. The number in favor drops to a third when jobs would be lost, without greater damage to the economy.

Similarly strong views showed up over whether the president should have more power at the expense of Congress and the courts, if doing so would help the economy. Three-fourths of Americans said no, up from two-thirds last year.

“It really does ratify how much Americans are against the federal government taking over private industry,” said Paul J. Lavrakas, a research psychologist and AP consultant who analyzed the results of the survey.

President Obama is an eloquent spokesman for his agenda, and he has an excellent political team with a lot of outside allies to push it. But as the old advertising joke goes, you can have the best research and the best design and the best advertising for your dog food, but it won’t sell if the dogs don’t like it.

Will you allow a foreigner to comment on something that has intrigued her about this great country?

All this hand-wringing and then censure (not to mention impeachment talk) over Rep. Joe Wilson’s admittedly rude intervention at President Obama’s speech last week has me baffled. Partly, it is because I come from a land that is governed by a parliamentary system, where Question Time is a much-loved institution. The offense (manufactured, perhaps) that Representative Wilson’s comment has caused is almost laughable when I think about some of the insults that have been hurled in both directions in Australia’s parliament. Here’s a collection of quotes from former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating just for starters (warning: offensive language). Here is a Brit’s take on why American politicians are “a bunch of wimps.”

Mainly, though, I am surprised that questioning of power is not more valued in America. To be sure, the President of the United States is not answerable to Congress in the same way that Ministers (including Prime Ministers) are to a Westminster-system parliament, but I would have thought that questioning the president would be well within the bounds of a nation conceived in liberty and on the understanding that all men are created equal. You got rid of infallible kings in 1776, remember?

I get why the Democrats are making political hay out of Representative Wilson’s outburst, even if I think they are hypocrites for suddenly finding religion on civility, given their own history. And I thoroughly reject, by the way, the notion that much of the criticism directed towards Obama is based on racism, even if this sort of talk gives unfortunate credence to the claims. But those same Dems who are shocked (shocked!) by Joe Wilson’s behavior are right now allowing a tax cheat to pull the nation’s purse strings.

This focus on style – who says what, how they say it, what their motivations might be – over the substance of what the congressional and administrative branches of government are doing is tremendously disappointing. I have heard far more censorious talk about Joe Wilson’s character and the propriety (or lack thereof) of what he did than of the point he was making. Meanwhile, the Dems are keeping “internal” investigations of Charlie Rangel’s ethical violations very quiet indeed.

Quite frankly, I’m far more interested in those than I am in Joe Wilson’s rudeness.

Item: The Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, a group of concerned scholars and authors who work on international security and U.S. foreign policy, have issued an open letter to President Obama warning him not to expand U.S. involvement in that country. (Full disclosure: I was a signatory.) The list of signatories includes many of the scholars who urged President Bush not to invade Iraq. Politico was the first to run the story: see here.

Among the many parallels being offered between Afghanistan and the Vietnam War, one of the most disturbing concerns inadequate examination of core assumptions. The Johnson administration was just as meticulous as the Obama administration is being in examining counterinsurgent strategies and the forces required to execute them. But most American discourse about Vietnam in the early and mid-1960s took for granted the key – and flawed – assumptions underlying the whole effort: that a loss of Vietnam would mean that other Asian countries would fall like dominoes to communism, and that a retreat from the commitment to Vietnam would gravely harm U.S. credibility.

The Obama administration and other participants in the debate about expanding the counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan can still avoid comparable error. But this would require not merely invoking Sept. 11 and taking for granted that a haven in Afghanistan would mean the difference between repeating and not repeating that horror. It would instead mean presenting a convincing case about how such a haven would significantly increase the terrorist danger to the United States. That case has not yet been made.

Item: Michael Crowley offers a piece in the New Republic that strongly implies but doesn’t quite come out and say that President Obama should ignore the skeptics and the political risks and wade deeper into Afghanistan. The piece swallows whole the conventional wisdom narrative on Iraq–that the Surge amounted not to a combination of defining down “victory” and appeasement of Sunni tribes but rather a borderline miracle whereby Gen. Petraeus loosed his wonder-working COIN doctrine on the maelstrom of violence in that country and produced a strategic victory. Crowley then uses this narrative to frame the decision before President Obama. Still, he writes

[I]f the definition of success isn’t clear to the Obama team, the definition of defeat may be. Bush argued unabashedly that Iraq had become “the central front in the war on terror” and that withdrawing before the country had stabilized would hand Al Qaeda not only a strategic but a moral victory. Current administration officials don’t publicly articulate the same rationale when discussing Afghanistan. But former CIA official Bruce Riedel, a regional expert who led the White House’s Afghanistan-Pakistan review earlier this year, cited it at the Brookings panel held in August. “The triumph of jihadism or the jihadism of Al Qaeda and the Taliban in driving NATO out of Afghanistan would resonate throughout the Islamic World. This would be a victory on par with the destruction of the Soviet Union in the 1990s,” Riedel said. “[T]he stakes are enormous.”

Obama may have one last thing in common with Bush: personal pride. Bush was determined to prevail in Iraq because he had invaded it. And, while Obama, of course, had nothing to do with the invasion of Afghanistan, he has long supported the campaign there–including during the presidential campaign as a foil for his opposition to the Iraq war. Speaking before a group of veterans last month, Obama called Afghanistan a “war of necessity”–a phrase which politically invests him deeper in the fight. “The president has boxed himself in,” says one person who has advised the administration on military strategy. “The worst possible place to be is that our justification for being in a war is that we’re in a war.”

Matt Yglesias has a lot of smart things to say about the pervasive illiteracy plaguing the Afghan National Army. Upwards of 75 to 90 percent (according to varying estimates) of the ANA is illiterate.

As Ted Galen Carpenter and I argue in our recent Cato white paper Escaping the Graveyard of Empires: A Strategy to Exit Afghanistan, this lack of basic education prevents many officers from filling out arrest reports, equipment and supply requests, and arguing before a judge or prosecutor. And as Marine 1st Lt. Justin Greico argues, “Paperwork, evidence, processing—they don’t know how to do it…You can’t get a policeman to take a statement if he can’t read and write.”

Yglesias notes:

This strikes me as an object lesson in the importance of realistic goal-setting.The Afghan National Army is largely illiterate because Afghanistan is largely illiterate…we just need an ANA that’s not likely to be overrun by its adversaries. But if we have the more ambitious goal of created [sic] an effectively administered centralized state, then the lack of literacy becomes a huge problem. And a problem without an obvious solution on a realistic time frame [emphasis mine].

Such high levels of illiteracy serves to highlight the absurd idea that the United States has the resources (and the legitimacy) to “change entire societies,” in the words of retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel John Nagl. Eight years ago, Max Boot, fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, likened the Afghan mission to British colonial rule:

Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets…This was supposed to be ‘for the good of the natives,’ a phrase that once made progressives snort in derision, but may be taken more seriously after the left’s conversion (or, rather, reversion) in the 1990s to the cause of ‘humanitarian’ interventions. [emphasis mine]

But as I highlighted yesterday at the Cato event “Should the United States Withdraw from Afghanistan?” (which you can view in its entirety here), policymakers must start narrowing their objectives in Afghanistan, a point Yglesias stresses above. Heck, as I argued yesterday, rational people in the United States are having difficulty convincing delusional types here in America that Barack Obama is their legitimate president. I am baffled by people who think that we have the power to increase the legitimacy of the Afghan government. It’s also ironic that many conservatives (possibly brainwashed by neo-con ideology) who oppose government intervention at home believe the U.S. government can bring about liberty and peace worldwide. These self-identified “conservatives” essentially have a faith in government planning.

Yet these conservatives share a view common among the political and military elite, which is that if America pours enough time and resources—possibly hundreds of thousands of troops for another 12 to 14 years—Washington could really turn Afghanistan around.

However, there is a reason why the war in Afghanistan ranks at or near the bottom of polls tracking issues important to the American public, and why most Americans who do have an opinion about the war oppose it (57 percent in the latest CNN poll released on Sept. 1) and oppose sending more combat troops (56 percent in the McClatchy-Ipsos survey, also released on Sept. 1). It’s because Americans understand intuitively that the question about Afghanistan is not about whether it is winnable, but whether it constitutes a vital national security interest. An essential national debate about whether we really want to double down in Afghanistan has yet take place. America still does not have a clearly articulated goal. This is why the conventional wisdom surrounding the war—about whether we can build key institutions and create a legitimate political system—is not so much misguided as it is misplaced.

The issue is not about whether we can rebuild Afghanistan but whether we should. On both accounts the mission looks troubling, but this distinction is often times overlooked.

After all of the rancor last week over his planned back-to-school address, it was predictable that in the end President Obama would offer a largely non-controversial speech about working hard and staying in school. If he sticks to the text released today, that is pretty much what he will do. Unfortunately, whether or not that was his original intent – and no one knows for sure but the President and his advisors – many Obama supporters will likely use the relatively staid final product as grounds to smear people concerned about the speech as right-wing kooks or out-of-control partisans. At the very least, such an outcome would be in keeping with a lot of the email I’ve gotten since the story first broke. But it will miss several critical points:

No matter how innocuous the content of the speech, this could certainly be an address with very political goals, intended to cast the president in the warm glow of a man who just cares about kids. From kissing babies, to photo-op reading sessions featuring cute tikes on classroom floors, this could be just another instance of the old practice of using children as props for political gain. And how presumptuous of the president to make himself – rather than the children, their teachers, and their schools – the center of attention on what is the first day of school for millions of kids. Finally, add the parts of the speech that sound like the President patting himself on the back for overcoming difficulties as a youth, and the speech could easily have political aims.

Many people feared, thanks to politically and ideologically suggestive lessonguides created by the U.S. Department of Education, that the speech would be an effort at indoctrination. Critically, it was only after very loud, initial outrage that the Department made changes to the guides and the White House announced it would release the text of the speech ahead of time. Yet administration defenders act like everyone knew from the outset that the speech would just be about working hard and staying in school. And who knows what the speech might have looked like had there not been so negative an initial reaction.

Despite its generally innocuous tone, the speech does contain some controversial political and ideological assertions, including that “setting high standards, supporting teachers and principals, and turning around schools” is the job of the federal government. Also, the things the President highlights as worthy aspirations are disproportionately government and non-profit work. And then there’s this self-aggrandizing assertion: “Your families, your teachers, and I are doing everything we can to make sure you have the education you need to answer these questions. I’m working hard to fix up your classrooms and get you the books, equipment and computers you need to learn.”

Ultimately, no matter what happens now that the speech has been published, one thing cannot be ignored or spun: When government controls education, wrenching political and social conflict is inevitable. Americans are very diverse – ideologically, ethnically, morally, religiously – but they all have to support a single system of government schools. As a result, they are constantly forced to fight to have their values and desires respected, and the losers inevitably have their liberty infringed. In this case, reasonable people who want their children to hear the President must fight it out with equally reasonable people who do not want their children to watch the speech in school. It’s a situation completely at odds with a free society, but as we have seen not just with the current conflict, but seemingly endless battles over history textbooks, the teaching of human origins, sex education, and on and on, it is inevitable when government runs the schools. Which is why the most important lesson to be learned from this presidential-address donnybrook is that Americans need educational freedom. We need universal school choice or crippling conflicts like this will keep on coming, liberty will continue to be compromised, and our society will be ripped farther and farther apart.